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Re: gdbstubs library posted at sourceforge
- To: gdb at sourceware dot cygnus dot com
- Subject: Re: gdbstubs library posted at sourceforge
- From: Jim Kingdon <kingdon at redhat dot com>
- Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2000 11:45:33 -0500
- References: <200001271910.OAA04242@devserv.devel.redhat.com>
> * I don't want someone turning gdbstubs itself into a closed source
> product
Well, my own personal perspective is that the #1 thing which prevents
this is an active community which is developing the open product. If
someone can avoid all the engineering costs of doing their own closed
fork, and get a much better result, they often will. If the open
version has stagnated, then they are kind of stuck with doing their
own version.
So I think putting it on sourceforge is the key thing which will
encourage people to contribute to gdbstubs, not the license (in the
past, noone had a suitable process for accepting submissions to the
stubs).
> (particularly the tracepoint stuff, when it arrives)
Ah, I see, scars from the proprietary tracepoint stubs. The story
here is that Red Hat is committed to open source and much of the code
which was closed source pre-merger will be opened. However, I have no
idea how that applies to tracepoint stubs (there are a lot of
programs/products to sort through and look at both business and
technical sides, and I wouldn't be surprised if tracepoints are a pawn
in a larger game and/or lost in the shuffle :-)).
You could argue that Cygnus's past actions disprove this, but I'd
argue that there just isn't much economic value in proprietary stubs,
and thus little risk/likelihood that we'll see a lot of proprietary
stubs. When Red Hat files their financials for the first quarter
combined with Cygnus (late March) you'll see actual numbers (at least,
I think so, I guess I don't know for sure exactly how they will break
it down).
> Maybe CEPL is a closer fit for what I'm after, because it accomplishes
> everything the LGPL does *and* eliminates the need for .o's? I could
> go there.
I would think CEPL/Mozilla works better than LGPL, yes (the CEPL is
basically the same license as the Mozilla license for those who don't
know - see http://sourceware.cygnus.com/ecos/ and
http://www.mozilla.org/ ).